Enabling Innovation in Higher Education: A Framework for Everyday, Strategic, and Radical Change

Higher education is in a period of change driven by increasing demands for student-centred learning, flexible delivery, and stronger industry relevance. While innovation in course design is widely recognised as essential, academics often face barriers such as limited time, institutional constraints, budget and financial constraints and risk aversion. Building on previous pedagogical and innovation models, this paper presents the enabling innovation framework, developed through an iterative, design-thinking process and grounded in Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation theory. The framework conceptualises three interconnected modes of innovation: everyday, strategic, and radical. The development of each mode highlights the importance of time and scholarly activity as underpinning concepts of the framework. Everyday innovation involves small, often spontaneous adjustments to teaching practice; strategic innovation is collaborative and aligns with institutional or program-level goals; and radical innovation is transformative, disrupting existing practices to create new cultures of learning. Together, these modes offer multiple entry points into innovation, encouraging academics to engage meaningfully with course design regardless of their level of risk appetite or institutional positioning. By framing innovation as a continuum supported by scholarship, the framework provides educators with a practical scaffold to initiate and sustain pedagogical change. This work argues that enabling innovation at different levels fosters a stronger culture of creativity, adaptability, and quality in higher education teaching and learning.